Recovery
Stabilise it, or stop it honestly.
Recovery is what happens after the assessment, if you decide you want us to do it. It is separately scoped, separately priced, and separately decided, because an assessment that automatically becomes a build is not an assessment.
What recovery actually involves
Rarely more technology. Usually decision rights, scope discipline, sequencing, and somebody willing to say out loud what everyone in the room already suspects.
- Rescoping to what the organisation can absorb, and defending that decision upwards.
- Governance reset. Who decides, who is consulted, and what happens when they disagree.
- Vendor and contract review. What was bought, what was delivered, and what leverage remains.
- Sequencing. What must happen before what, and what can be abandoned without loss.
- Measurement agreed in advance, so progress stops being a matter of opinion.
- Handover. The system runs without us, or the recovery has not worked.
Why an outside party
A firm that built the programme cannot credibly assess it, and most firms in this market are structurally oriented toward selling the next phase. That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is what their business model requires of them.
The internal position is harder still. The people closest to a stalled programme are usually the ones whose judgement would be questioned by naming the problem plainly. Somebody from outside can say it without it being a resignation.
Politically constrained programmes
In family-controlled and government-adjacent organisations the hard part is almost never technical. The programme is entangled with someone’s authority, someone’s budget and someone’s standing. A finding that is correct and undeliverable is worth nothing.
The constraint is described as a property of the system rather than the failure of a person, because that is usually the truth and always the more useful framing. Nobody is named in a finding. Everything is covered by the discretion policy.
Recovery begins with an assessment
We do not quote recovery work before establishing what is wrong. Anyone who does is guessing, or selling you something they already had.